During Lent I will be preaching on the sacrificial life and death of Jesus Christ as recorded in the Gospel of John.  While few modern Christians practice a strict regimen of fasting that was common in earlier times, many Christians become more diligent in their spiritual disciplines of prayer and confession, Bible study, and public worship during the season of Lent.  Often Christians will make particular sacrifices in their personal habits or lifestyle in order to more fully serve God and others.

During the first three centuries, as the number of adult baptisms declined and infant baptisms increased, this forty-day period of preparation and fasting before Easter was expanded to include not only new converts but all Christians as they reaffirmed their baptismal identity.  By the early fourth century, all Christians were encouraged to abstain from meat, fish, eggs, and dairy products during Lent, along with an increase in their disciplines of prayer and confessions of sins.
Today the season of Lent is actually forty six days before Easter.  The extra days were added in the seventh century to compensate for the fact that Sundays were excluded from the days of  fasting.  The symbolic use of ashes to begin the observance of Lent derives from the ancient Hebrew use of ashes to signify repentance (turning away) of sin as well as the mourning over death.  The Apostle Paul wrote that "all of us who have been baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death.  We were buried therefore with him by baptism into death, so that as Christ was raised from the dead … we too might walk in newness of life." (Romans 6:3-4)  During the season of Lent, Christians are encouraged to reflect on the ways in which our past selfish and sinful ways are to be put to death, a death symbolically portrayed in baptism.

By Randy Wallingford

Our Church begins the observance of Lent with an Ash Wednesday Service on February 28, 7:00 p.m.  The English word "lent" comes from the Anglo-Saxon "lencten," meaning "springtime."  The observance of Lent developed in the first few centuries as a forty-day period of spiritual preparation and discipline for new converts to the Christian faith, leading up to their profession of faith and baptism on Easter Sunday.
Initially, the new converts fasted (abstained from food) and prayed for 40 hours prior to Easter morning, the time from the crucifixion of Jesus to his resurrection.  The time of fasting was gradually extended to a week, and then early in the third century was further extended to forty days.  A period of forty days reflects the time of preparation and testing of Jesus in the desert before he began his public ministry, as well as the forty years that the ancient Hebrew people wandered in the Sinai desert with Moses before they entered the promised land of Canaan.

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